Summarizing Relevant Parts from Technical Videos

Software developers frequently watch technical videos and tutorials online as solutions to their problems. However, the audiovisual explanations of the videos might also claim more time from the developers than the text-only materials (e.g., programming Q&A threads). Thus, pinpointing and summarizing the relevant fragments from these videos could save the developers valuable time and effort. In this paper, we propose a novel technique – TechTube – that can be used to find video segments that are relevant to a given technical task. TechTube allows a developer to express the task as a natural language query. To account for missing vocabularies in the query, TechTube automatically reformulates the query using techniques based on information retrieval. The reformulated query is matched against a repository of online technical videos. The output from TechTube is a sequence of relevant video segments that can be useful to implement the task at hand. Unlike previous researches, our approach splits the video by detecting silence in video audio tracks. Experiments using 98 programming related search queries show that our approach delivers the relevant videos within the Top-5 results 93% of the time with a mean average precision of 76%. We also find that TechTube can deliver the most relevant section of a technical video with 67% precision and 53% recall that outperforms the closely related existing approach from the literature. Our developer study involving 16 participants reports that they found the video summaries generated by TechTube very accurate, precise, concise, and very useful for their programming tasks rather than the original complete videos.